Teach-In against Corporate Greed

Faculty are invited to bring their classes.
From 1100AM to 1230PM the national teach-in will be streaming live on the
big screen. From 1230 to 200PM we will have local speakers and discussion
about the current assault on unions, students, the poor and elderly, women,
people of color, and gays. There will be a lot to talk about, but at this
point some of the key issues are these:

Corporate and particularly Wall St fraud and looting of the public via
regressive redistribution of taxation and social provision of all types: in
education, health care, public transport etc.

Efforts to rescind hard-won rights: workers’ rights to organize and bargain
collectives, women’s rights to abortion, contraception, and a variety of
health services, students’, poor people’s, and people of color’s right to
vote, gay people’s rights to marry and domestic partnership, a variety of
civil rights and liberties, and others….

In respect to these rollback efforts it is most notable that few of them
have any relationship to the US fiscal crisis, which was the supposed big
issue in the 2010 elections; where there is a significant relationship, it
usually involves worsening and deepening that crisis, for example by
cutting corporate taxes and further reducing the already limited tax burden
of the wealthy.

Although there was no advance indication that newly elected leaders were
planning this on either the federal, state, or local levels, a coordinated
national initiative is underway to undermine the Democratic Party in
advance of the 2012 elections, both by restricting its access to funds and
by curtailing the voting rights of its main constituency bases: unionized
workers, people of color, young voters, and women. None of these groups
have any significant relationship to the fiscal crisis of the state at any
level, although propaganda efforts are underway to suggest that public
sector workers, abortion rights, and such programs as HeadStart are the
sources of the problem. We are talking largely about Republican strategy
here, but it is notable that at thus far there has been little Democratic
effort to counter these assaults.

The purpose of this Teach-in is to raise consciousness on campuses across
the country about the present political crisis, and to help mobilize
students in their own (and the public) interest.

hm 3/24/11